Outgoing director fires parting shot at critics who 'paralysed’ her.

She is the acclaimed theatre director behind the award-winning play Black Watch, a visceral study of Scottish soldiers in Iraq that is still touring the globe.

But for all her success in setting up the National Theatre of Scotland, Vicky Featherstone has disclosed that she endured anti-English bullying to such an extent that it briefly left her unable to do her job.

In a parting shot after she announced that she was leaving Glasgow to take up a new job at London’s Royal Court Theatre, Miss Featherstone, from Surrey, said the bullying had “really, really upset” her and left her “paralysed” artistically.

She was given the task of setting up a national theatre company in Scotland in 2004 and is responsible for a series of acclaimed plays, including productions of Peer Gynt and Macbeth as well as Black Watch, which has won 22 awards.

In a newspaper interview, she said that her nationality had been an issue for some writers and members of the Scottish public writing to letters pages, who used her “Englishness” against her.

The departing artistic director, who has an English degree from Manchester University, said critics repeatedly began to mention her background in relation to her programming choices, and complained that she was not staging older Scottish plays.

“It became a thing, interestingly, because people didn’t like my programming,” she said.

“And rather than articulating that, it was easier to say the reason my programming was wrong for Scotland was because I am English, and therefore I don’t understand how to programme for Scotland.

“It really, really upset me, because, as with all kinds of bullying, you don’t have a voice, so the hardest thing for me was that if people had criticised the programme, I could have defended it, but when people are criticising the programme because I am English, that is indefensible.

“What it did, for a short period of time, was paralyse me from being able to make artistic decisions and I felt defensive. I had a period, not long, because I am very strong, of a few weeks where I thought: I cannot do this job, I don’t know how to do it.”

Her comments emerged a day after Alasdair Gray, the Scottish author and artist, complained in an essay about “colonists” coming to Scotland for a short period to advance their careers in the arts world.

Recent Scottish police figures showed a record number of racist attacks against white Britons.

The figures led the Scottish Liberal Democrats to call for the SNP government to do all it could to guard against anti-English rhetoric “creeping” into Scottish society.

Miss Featherstone said she responded to her period of uncertainty by setting up Staging the Nation, a series of events last year debating older plays.

She said people writing in newspapers had incredible power and she felt the criticism came from a small group who did not represent the view of the national theatre throughout Scotland.

A source said she was not leaving because of anti-English bullying, and would “not have left for any job other than the Royal Court Theatre”.

Miss Featherstone added, in the interview with a Scottish newspaper, that her role in Glasgow had been “incredibly inspiring” and life changing.

She said: “So I feel I am leaving ahead of time, which is good, but also means I am feeling grief about it.”

She will become the first female artistic director of the Royal Court in April, and will be succeeded in Glasgow by Laurie Sansom, the former head of the Royal & Derngate theatre in Northampton, who is also English.